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Ian and Sylvia
Four Strong Winds / C.C. Rider - 7"
Vanguard - 1963
Michael Panontin
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'Four Strong Winds' was once voted the greatest Canadian song of the twentieth century by CBC listeners. It has been covered by dozens of performers over the years - the Second Hand Songs site lists an astounding 136 - including by folk heavyweights Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins and John Denver, as well as up here in Canuckistan by Neil Young, Sarah McLachlan and Blue Rodeo. Ian Tyson reportedly wrote the song in about thirty minutes while he and his singing partner, Sylvia Fricker, were attempting to break into the Greenwich Village folk scene.
Tyson and Fricker were both young out-of-towners when they met in Toronto in 1959. He had come to Ontario from BC to pursue a career in commercial design, while the young Fricker, still in her teens and seven years his junior, had arrived from tiny Chatham ON. The pair were introduced to each other by Tyson's work foreman and began performing around town as Ian and Sylvia. By 1962, they had moved to New York and were rubbing shoulders with many of the folk movement's main actors, including an up-and-coming Bob Dylan.
"Bob Dylan was on MacDougal Street, as the rest of our little group was - and which consisted of Peter, Paul and Mary and little Ann Chandler and Tom Paxton. We were all a little group hanging out," Tyson recalled for NPR. "We used to hang out at a bar called the Kettle of Fish. And one autumn afternoon, I was in the Kettle of Fish and Bob Dylan came in and sang me a song that he was working on."
Tyson credits that tune - he guesses it was 'Blowin' in the Wind' though he's not quite sure - as the catalyst for 'Four Strong Winds'. "You know, he's just rattling it off," he recalled. "And I thought, I can do that. How hard can this be?" So he rang up Albert Grossman, who had helped the pair sign with Vanguard and get their debut LP issued that year, and asked him for a small favour. Grossman, Tyson explained, "was the only one that had a roof over his head". So he asked Grossman, whose management roster included Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and not long after, Ian and Sylvia, if he could kindly use his place to try a little songwriting.
It didn't take him long at all.
"I went over there and it was a funky, little apartment. Took my guitar and just opened up the case and started to, fooling around and strumming. And it took half an hour."
'Four Strong Winds' was first issued in the US in the late summer of 1963. The bittersweet ballad about migrant work and its unfortunate byproducts: separation and heartache ("If the good times are all gone / then I'm bound for movin' on / I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way") was the first song Tyson had ever written...and he certainly never expected it to be a hit. "I didn't think anything of it, really." And it mostly did go unnoticed in the US, save for some airplay in Chicago and Philadelphia. But Canadians definitely got the memo, with the single charting in a number of cities, including an impressive #9 showing in Toronto on CHUM in October that year.
From there the song took on a life of its own. Neil Young, who covered 'Four Strong Winds' on his 1978 set Comes a Time, recalled shoving nickels and dimes into a jukebox as a teen in Manitoba and listening to it over and over. Bobby Bare's rendition in late '64 rocketed all the way up to #3 on the US country charts. And a translated version became a huge hit for the Vanguards in Norway in 1966, as well as for the Hep Stars in Sweden the following year.
After 'Four Strong Winds', Tyson naively thought the hits would start gushing from his pen. "I thought, well, I can write a couple of those a week," he laughed. "But I found out quite quickly that you don't write a couple of them a week - at all." Not that he's complaining. Royalties from Bare's version alone allegedly helped the singer-songwriter buy a 350-acre farm back in Ontario. Not bad for thirty minutes' work.
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